Marsha Lederman, in reflecting on the announcement that Gord Downie from The Tragically Hip has been diagnosed with fatal brain tumour, closes her piece with a turn that opens as a return to the where and when she first heard the music and veers into a contemplation of life as "hard, huge and haunted".

This week, feeling something more sharp and painful than nostalgia, I pumped Fully Completely at full blast. Nearly a quarter-century and thousands of kilometres from that Hamilton flat, the trees outside my Vancouver home were bursting green, obscuring the mountains. My past came crashing through the window as I contemplated life – hard, huge and haunted.

I thought about the years, so many years, gone by; people gone from my life, people gone from the world, people on their way out of it. What can you do? They’ve all gone. We’ll go, too.